In the modern era, most individuals have several telephony devices (also referred to herein as “telephones”, or simply “phones”) available to them to make and receive calls. Mobile telephone handsets, such as cellular telephones, have become ubiquitous as users enjoy the convenience and portability they provide. In the home or office environment, users still typically maintain their traditional home desktop landline or office landline telephone using the traditional public switched telephone network (PSTN). More recently, users have started to utilize Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) telephones. The VoIP telephone may be a personal computer (PC) executing a VoIP application such as Skype™ that provides telephone communications service over the Internet. These VoIP telephones are popular with users as they provide telephony services for free or at reduced costs, including calls to international destinations.
Due to this increased availability of telephony devices, individuals will often have two or more telephones in their immediate vicinity. Thus, most users operate in a multiple telephony channel enabled environment, with more than one way of talking to others. As a result, situations arise when more than one device is active or may become active at the same time.
In the prior art, the ability to talk to several people on one telephone, conference calling, has been provided either by a telephone base station or network facilities. The telecommunications service provider may charge a fee for providing conference calling functions. Another limitation is that the user interface to setup and control the two telephone calls to initiate a conference call is reliant upon the dial pad of a single telephone. Typically, the user must establish a first call with one of the conference participants. The user must then somehow place that participant on hold. The user must then initiate a call to a second conference participant. If the second conference participant answers, the user must somehow join this second call with the first call that has been placed on hold. If the second conference participant does not answer, the user must somehow terminate the second call and switch back to the first call previously placed on hold.
Since the telephone dial pad is optimized for making and receiving only a single call at a time, there is uncertainty and confusion on the part of users attempting to initiate a conference call using a single dial pad to perform the call origination, hold, and connect functions for multiple calls simultaneously. The user often fears losing one or both calls. As a result, the conference capability, even if available, is generally not used by the majority of ordinary telephone users.
As a result, there is a need for improved methods and systems for enabling conference calls.